


When We Were Idlers

by Skeiler



Category: Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
Genre: Alternate Universe - Coffee Shops & Cafés, M/M, Meet-Cute, leaning over the counter and being critical is the new leaning in a window and chundering
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-17
Updated: 2019-12-17
Packaged: 2021-02-26 05:55:02
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,252
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21828553
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Skeiler/pseuds/Skeiler
Summary: Charles is working in a coffee shop during the Easter vac when he meets Sebastian Flyte in the most unusual way.
Relationships: Sebastian Flyte/Charles Ryder
Comments: 8
Kudos: 17
Collections: Yuletide 2019





	When We Were Idlers

**Author's Note:**

  * For [violet_strange](https://archiveofourown.org/users/violet_strange/gifts).



It was March, a time of coldness and grey, all mirth and life muted beneath the low, misty clouds. The week before, snow had fallen, been pretty for an hour, and then turned to mud. Term had ended, the city had emptied, save for a handful of students who chose not to go home over the Easter vac. There was a feeling in the air at this mid-way point of anticipation—as if the whole of that city of aquatint (myself included) was waiting for something to happen. Indeed, I was wishing for something to happen, for something miraculous to reveal itself to me and show me the Oxford I had read about in books, seen in paintings, glimpsed in poetry, and yet had not managed to find on my own. Where was the city Arnold had promised, that sweet city which needs not June for beauty’s heightening—lying lovely at all times1?

I wished for something to happen never more ardently than when I was working. My father, as a kind of joke, had agreed to give me £550 _per year_ , in this, the year of our Lord 2019, along with an admonishment that I had better not get myself into ‘queer street’ (the slur itself used ironically, an affectation of my father’s—part of his propensity for speaking as if he was in a Waugh novel). I knew my father well enough that I expected no assistance from him when my checking account began to dip into my overdraft, and I decided to find myself employment to refill my coffers before the heady balls of Trinity Term.

Thus I found myself cleaning coffee mugs and readying for another day at the Cadena Café, trying to ignore my disillusionment with the subject I was reading, my college, the university, the entire city—and most of all with the people in it.

It was during this fit of pique and disaffection that Sebastian entered my life, throwing open the door to the enchanted garden. We were in different colleges, reading different subjects, from different social strata—I might have spent my entire three or four years at Oxford without meeting him if it hadn’t been for the fact that he got legless at a club dinner one night and wandered into the Cadena the next morning incredibly hungover and clutching his signature teddy bear. He seemed to embody that Oxford that makes space for ideas, trials, pardonable follies, the general lightness of youth2.

“Aloysius will have a black coffee,” Sebastian said when he arrived at the counter. “And I will have five shots of espresso in a mug with a small scoop of sugar.”

I stared. I stared because Sebastian was very beautiful, even when frowning, and I stared because even for a hangover five shots of espresso seemed excessive.

Still, the first lesson I’d been given by Mr. Jasper, the manager, when he trained me was to always make whatever the customer asks for and so I rang up one black coffee and five shots of espresso.

“£11.50.”

Sebastian paid without blinking. He seemed disengaged from the world around him, admonishing his teddy bear for some excess it had committed. Even as I wiped out the portafilters of the machine and filled them both with fresh grounds, I couldn’t take my eyes off him. Sebastian was simply fascinating. I felt like I was under a spell as I automatically put two espresso cups under the filter and began to pull the first two shots.

“No, that isn’t right,” Sebastian said suddenly, and I looked over to see him leaning well over the counter and watching me. His bear’s eyes were turned upon me as well.

“I beg your pardon?”

“You aren’t doing that right,” Sebastian repeated, voice peevish. “I said ‘five shots in one mug’ not ‘five shots pulled separately and poured into the same mug.’ If you do them separately, you won’t be able to get all the crema into the mug.”

This affront provoked in me a feeling of resentment. I was still new to the barista trade, but I fancied that a week’s training was all I needed to have more proficiency than hungover undergraduates. “Well, how do _you_ suggest I do it?”

“Put the scoop of sugar in the bottom of the mug and put the mug beneath the- the _thing_ ,” Sebastian said fractiously, waving his hand towards the grouphead while I unsnapped the portafilter and cleaned out the old grounds. “Do two sets of two directly into the mug, and then do one.”

“This machine does two shots per pull,” I pointed out. “Why don’t you just have six shots?”

“Because I must have _five_.”

Sebastian was lucky that I found him beautiful and his eccentricities forgivable because I felt a sharp exasperation with him. Very carefully I cleaned everything and prepared to start over—this time with decaffeinated grounds. A petty vengeance, but something about which I felt no compunction. I took a mug and held it up for Sebastian’s approval, marveled at the epicene nature of his eyes, all long lashes and delicate brows. He watched me like a hawk even as he pretended insouciance.

When finally the work was done, I handed Sebastian his five-shots-of-espresso mug and his bear’s black coffee and he went to sit with in the window overlooking Cornmarket at the people leaving St Michael’s at the Northgate and at those lunching in the Pret a Manger. He did not leave a tip, but I nevertheless watched him walk away with a great confluence of emotions. There was an air about him of enchantment, as if the sun appeared and flowers bloomed at his passing—and I longed to know him better.

When at length he left the coffeehouse, I watched him disappear down Ship Street and sighed. He had not cleared his own table, and he had not even glanced at me again. The sunlight went with him.

I spent the rest of the day in a rather mopey state, taking orders and fulfilling them mechanically. After the hundredth mocha latte I felt as if I never wanted to set eyes on a coffee machine ever again. Lunt, the shift supervisor, took pity on me and let me leave an hour early, and I wandered the grey streets feeling as if the towery and branchy city3 of Hopkins’ was a forest of dead trees, no life in it at all.

This feeling persisted until the next day, when I forced myself to return to work. What I found when I arrived was no dull, quiet coffee shop but a hothouse nursery of great activity. A van was parked in St Michael’s Street and a man was ferrying what appeared to be the entire day’s worth of blooms from both the florists in the Covered Market inside the Cadena. I found Lunt, the shift supervisor, arranging them on every table and on any surface that wasn’t in use.

“What is all this?” I asked.

As a reply, Lunt handed me a note, which had been scribbled on the back of a postcard of Van Gogh’s _Sunflowers_. It read:

_Aloysius tells me I was ghastly yesterday. Please come to lunch at noon and let me make it up to you._

“Lunt,” I said, turning to him. “I need to leave today at 11:45.”

____________________________________________________

1 - Matthew Arnold, _Thyrsis_

2 - Keith Douglas, _Oxford_

3 - Gerard Manley Hopkins, _Duns Scotus’ Oxford_

The title is from Hartley Coleridge's _Friendship._

**Author's Note:**

> I can't express enough thanks to my friend and beta-reader and barista extraordinaire meej for not only describing Sebastian's drink to me but also for cheering me on. <3


End file.
